Her main area of linguistics is historical sociolinguistics, sociopragmatics and discourse analysis, as well as corpus linguistics and manuscript studies.
PhD, Docent, Senior University Lecturer
Unioninkatu 40B
PL 24, 00014 University of Helsinki, Finland
Phone: +358 29 412 3106
E-mail: minna.nevala(at)helsinki.fi
I am interested in how person reference was used to reflect individual social roles and statuses of Late Modern England, in other words, how people referred to themselves and to other people as members of a certain group. I study language as a socio-pragmatic means to convey social identification and representation between individuals and within different groups in public texts, such as newspapers and other media. One of the objectives of my research is to show that shifting between in-group and out-group membership is a central function in the use of person reference terms by extending the scope of research beyond mere nominal reference forms. Currently, my research is focused on our Academy of Finland funded project Languaging Crises: Diachronic Perspectives on Public Communication during Three Pandemics (LanCris; 2023-2027), in which we study the key linguistic and discursive features of local and national government crisis communication in the UK and the US during three historically impactful health crises: tuberculosis, Spanish flu and COVID-19.